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August 14, 2006

UK: Seventy Muslim Terror Plots Right Now - Official

Last week on Wednesday 9 August, the Home Secretary John Reid attended a meeting of Demos, a London think tank. It had been widely predicted what he would say, due to "leaks" judiciously placed in the media by his allies and close associates - that Britain was facing the biggest threat since World War II. However his words, when heard issuing from his own mouth, still had the power to shock. The Guardian reported his speech later that day.

Reid said that the legal system should be responsive to change, and should adapt in a Darwinian way to survive. He said: "It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." He made reference to the way necessary rulings were undermined by judges requiring "sufficiently cogent admissable evidence for a criminal trial", and the legal obstacles to detaining or deporting.

Though not specified, this was a direct barb aimed at judges like Mr Justice Sullivan (pictured right), who had ruled last month that the policy of "control orders" which had had been introduced by Charles Clarke, Reid's predecessor, breached detainees' human rights, as defined in Article 5 of the European Convention Of Human Rights.

We reported on May 16 that Sullivan had ruled that nine Afghans who had hijacked a plane from Kabul to Britain, carrying 173 passengers, in February 2000, were free to stay indefinitely. This decision came only 11 days after John Reid was given his job as Home Secretary on May 5. Reid vowed to appeal against Sullivan's decision, but on 4 August appeal judges ruled that he could not impose the restrictions of "temporary admission", which would have denied the hijackers the right to work and allowed the government to control their movements. Reid vowed to change the law.

When he stood on the podium at Demos' assembly on Wednesday, John Reid was in his 98th day of office. He knew a lot about the terror threat Britain was under, but appeared to be smoothing the way for greater revelations.

He told the audience: "Sometimes we may have to modify some of our own freedoms in the short term in order to prevent their misuse by those who oppose our fundamental values and would destroy all of our freedoms."

He also used a term which has since gained some currency, when he warned that European Rights had been made after the abuses brought in by state fascism, but were now threatened by "fascist individuals".

Reid warned: "We are probably in the most sustained period of severe threat since the end of World War II. Our security forces and the apparatus of the state provide a very necessary condition for defeating terrorism but can never be sufficient to do so on their own. Our common security will only be assured by a common effort from all sections of society."

He also said that mass migration in a globalized world was the "greatest challenge facing European governments" as, despite introducing great potential, it also brought insecurity into communities.

The Independent described how from 9.30 pm on Wednesday, Reid chaired the first of three meetings of Cobra, the civil contingencies committee, which gets its name from "Cabinet Office Briefing Room A". The Prime MInister, holidaying in Cliff Richard's villa in Barbados was kept informed, as the arrests began to be made from 10.30 onwards. Reid slept only for a few minutes that night.

Within a matter of 14 hours from the time the Guardian reported his Demos speech, John Reid, under pressure from the US, announced to a shocked international community that there was a plot underway to sabotage nine US_bound planes, which would be hit by suicide bombers across the Atlantic. As he made his announcement, the police were already in the process of arresting suspects.

By Friday, when Reid was in office for his 100th day, there were 24 Muslims in custody, and the details were spilling out from every opening of the media to a shocked public. Since then, two more British citizens have been arrested in Pakistan. According to Aftab Sherpao, the Pakistan Interior Minister, one of the British men in custody, Rashid Rauf, has now confessed to Pakistani authorities that the plot had been nurtured by "Al Qaeda based in Afghanistan." Rashid Rauf had been a UK born Muslim, who grew up in Ward End in Birmingham, where his father ran a cake-making business, Classic Confectionery Supplies.

Over the weekend, one of the suspects in British detention was released without charge. The rest remain at Paddington Green police station in West London, the high security building which is used for the detention and interrogation of all terror suspects. But the shock revelation by the Home Secretary concerning the massive scale of the plot was not the only horrific surprise which he had up his sleeve.

On Saturday, he told police constables that there was no place for "complacency or self-congratulation". He told them: "As I have said all along, no one should be under any illusion that the threat ended with the recent arrests. It didn't."

Yesterday, the Guardian announced that, from security service sources, there were "two dozen" terror cells operational in Britain. This was not strictly speaking new information. The Home Secretary has clearly stated previously that there several terrorist cells active in Britain. He said in May that there twenty major plots currently in motion.

But John Reid has now officially confirmed that there are "24 major conspiracies" currently underway in Britain, reported today's Telegraph. But these are the "major conspiracies" the ones which aim to cause high casualties and to fill the pages of newspapers across the globe if brought to fruition. He claimed that overall there are 70 terrorist plots currently underway in Britain.

John Reid spoke on BBC News 24 yesterday. saying; "There would be more [plots] which are not at the centre of our considerations and there may be more that we don't know about at all." He spoke of four plots which had been broken up as a result of intelligence operations.

On July 4, we wrote of there being 1,200 Islamist terror suspects who were being investigated by MI5, from a larger pool of 400,000 extremist sympathisers. Peter Clarke, Deputy Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, had announced at this time that police officers are currently engaged in the investigation of 70 terror plots in Britain and abroad. He claimed that the majority of these investigations "relate to the activities of British citizens against their fellow countrymen".

Clarke said then: "That is the nature of what we face. The defence of the capital often starts many thousands of miles away. We have more active investigations than we have ever had before. Despite the increase in resources, we are running at or near capacity. There is a lot of intelligence to be investigated - some of it is very sinister. It is a very, very concerning intelligence picture."

On the day of John Reid's Demos speech, disclosures on the financial implications of tracing such a high number of potential terrorists revealed that the bulk of the budget of MI5 was being swallowed up. 87% of the budget or £174 million ($332 million) per year is being spent on tracking Islamic terrorists in Britain.

The future for Britain is one in which, no matter how much money we throw at the problem, Islamic fascism has been allowed to run rampant in Britain and will ultimately create more acts of violent terror.

For years, Britain adopted a "softly-softly" approach to extremists, allowing preachers of hate like Omar Bakri Mohammed, founder of Al Muhajiroun and first head of Britain's branch of Hizb ut-Tahrir to preach dissension, jihad and martyrdom for 20 years before he was finally barred from Britain. And Bakri Mohammed had only been prevented from being in Britain because he had already fled, fearing prosecution.

Abu Hamza had been allowed to preach similar messages at Finsbury Park mosque, and the intelligence services did nothing to stop him. Only when it was revealed that terrorists such as Mohammed Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer had been to the mosque to become inspired by Hamza's speeches, as well as Zacarias Moussaoui and the shoe-bomber Richard Reid, did the authorities move to prosecute Hamza.

Britain's intelligence services believed, wrongly, that it was better to quietly monitor the sermons inciting jihad and war on the west, rather than thumping down with an iron fist. As a result of allowing such preachers to flourish unimpeded, the virus of jihad has infected mosques, websites, publications, and most of all the brains of disaffected angry young Muslims, across the country.

And once again, we are hearing of another mosque, attended by some of those currently suspected of plotting "murder on an unimaginable scale", in Walthamstow, east London.The Sunday Times reported that eight suspects regularly visited the Masjid-E-Umer mosque, and three of these were well-known to the congregation.

The mosque may not be to blame, but in Britain, we have had such a crisis of leadership in Britain's Muslim community, who have been courted by media and government alike, that no act or plot of terrorism should really surprise anyone. With senior figures at the Muslim Council for Britain formerly praising Osama bin Laden and spouting antisemitic vitriol, yet being paid money from non-Muslim tax-payers, and being allowed to influence government policy for the past year, the time has come to stamp down hard. These "representatives", who support terrorists like Hamas, are the undoing of Britain. Their "letter", disingenuously blaming Britain's foreign policy for Muslim terrorism was received with harsh criticism even from liberals.

Part of the reason why Britain differs from America in its policies against terrorism stems directly from the need for police officers to amass considerable evidence to be able to take any case to court and hope to secure a conviction. Since the directives of European law became enshrined as a "higher authority" than the laws formulated within parliament, Britain has been further weakened in its ability to mount a credible defense against terror.

The US authorities had wanted John Reid to act sooner and disclose the nature of the threat posed to the world public by the air terror plot. But Britain's judiciary in the form of sanctimonious appeals court judges and others, such as Justice Sullivan, have made a mockery of British justice. Even though a home secretary has powers to rule extradition orders, terrorists have the power to play the appeals court system for all it is worth. Charles Clarke, the previous Home Secretary, was ultimately skewered by such measures, and rendered ineffective.

As a result of the judicial games that are played, the US is still waiting for Haroon Rashid Aswat and Babar Ahmad to arrive on their soil to face trial. It is more than a year that the Americans, Britain's allies, have had to wait. The French had to wait for TEN YEARS before Rachid Ramda, responsible for deadly subway blasts in Paris, was returned to face justice.

There is a fire in John Reid that has not been seen in a Home Secretary for more than two decades. But as he said in his speech on Wednesday, the security services "cannot guarantee 100% success."

And somewhere along the line, a Muslim fascist will get through the net of security, and give everyone an atrocity to remember.

Keyword: The name of the UK police operation on the air terror plot is Operation Overt

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at August 14, 2006 9:26 AM

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Posted by: Cornelius at August 14, 2006 2:34 PM

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